The Fear Index

had somehow fallen from a state of grace, and again Gabrielle was reminded of a priest. There was an other-worldly quality to him, as there was to Alex.
    She had to prompt him. ‘But about the nineties …’
    ‘Yes, so anyway, back to the nineties …’
    Alex had arrived in Geneva only a couple of years after CERN’s scientists had invented the World Wide Web. And oddly enough, it was that which had seized his imagination: not re-creating the Big Bang or finding the God particle or creating antimatter, but the possibilities of serial processing power, emergent machine reasoning, a global brain.
    ‘He was a romantic on the subject – always dangerous. I was his section head at the Computing Centre. Maggie and I helped him get on his feet a bit. He used to babysit our boys when they were small. He was hopeless at it.’
    ‘I bet.’ She bit her lip at the thought of Alex with children.
    ‘Completely hopeless . We’d come home and find him upstairs asleep in their beds and them downstairs watching television. He was always pushing himself far too hard, exhausting himself. He had this obsession with artificial intelligence, although he disliked the hubristic connotations of AI and preferred to call it AMR – autonomous machine reasoning. Are you very technically minded?’
    ‘No, not at all.’
    ‘Isn’t that difficult, being married to Alex?’
    ‘To be honest, I think the opposite. It’s what makes it work.’ Or did , she nearly added. It was the self-absorbed mathematician – his social artlessness, the strange innocence of him – that she had fallen in love with; it was the new Alex, the billionaire hedge-fund president, she found difficult to take.
    ‘Well, without getting too technical about it, one of the big challenges we face here is simply analysing the sheer amount of experimental data we produce. It’s now running around twenty-seven trillion bytes each day. Alex’s solution was to invent an algorithm that would learn what to look for, so to speak, and then teach itself what to look for next. That would make it able to work infinitely faster than a human being. It was theoretically brilliant, but a practical disaster.’
    ‘So it didn’t work?’
    ‘Oh yes, it worked. That was the disaster. It started spreading through the system like bindweed. Eventually we had to quarantine it, which meant basically shutting everything down. I’m afraid I had to tell Alex that that particular line of research was too unstable to be continued. It would require containment, like nuclear technology, otherwise one was effectively just unleashing a virus. He wouldn’t accept it. Things became quite ugly for a while. He had to be forcibly removed from the facility on one occasion.’
    ‘And that was when he had his breakdown?’
    Walton nodded sadly. ‘I never saw a man so desolate. You would’ve thought I’d murdered his child.’

15

    As I was considering these issues … a new concept popped into my head: ‘the digital nervous system’ … A digital nervous system consists of the digital processes that enable a company to perceive and react to its environment, to sense competitor challenges and customer needs, and to organise timely responses …

    BILL GATES, Business at the Speed of Light (2000)

    BY THE TIME Hoffmann reached his office, it was the end of the working day – about 6.00 p.m. in Geneva, noon in New York. People were coming from the building, heading for home or a drink or the gym. He stood in a doorway opposite and checked for any sign of the police, and when he was satisfied they were not in evidence he went loping across the street, stared bleakly at the facial scanner and was admitted, passed straight through the lobby, up in one of the elevators, and on to the trading floor. The place was still full; most people did not leave their desks until eight. He put his head down and headed for his office, trying not to notice the curious looks he was attracting. Sitting at her desk, Marie-Claude watched him approach. She opened her mouth to speak and Hoffmann held up his hands. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I need ten minutes on my own and then I’ll deal with all of it. Don’t let anyone in, okay?’
    He went inside and closed the door. He sat in his expensive orthopaedic chair with its state-of-the-art tilt mechanism and opened the German’s laptop. Who had hacked into his medical records – that was the question. Whoever it was must be behind everything else. It baffled him. He